"Moralise all you might like - I don't believe in it"

This is my favourite Okkervil River song, indeed, one of my fav songs full stop. From the Black Sheep Boy Appendix album (the same sessions as 2005's Black Sheep Boy, their best album imo), 'No Key, No Plan' sees Will Sheff at his impassioned best. He uses his gift for narrative to imbue his characters with vital relevance full of implication as to how to live our humble everyday lives. In this case Sheff uses the persona of a destuctive criminal hell bent on "crash land(ing)", to represent the adrenalin of living for the moment. Of carpe diem. "Back on the road again, with maybe 13 grand", the song then flips to "a rich young sophisticate", who, like Sheff, is "doing what I really like, and getting paid for it". These worldly pleasures are elevated and justified in the song's transcendent finale where Sheff screams with that cracked voice, of how "There is only now", no hell, thus no use in inhibition or morality: "just breathe it in."
      This song always gives me comfort when I think of the essential senselessness of what we are doing, why we are here. Existing. It is so urgent, compelling a listener, if not to go out and pull a heist like the character in the song, at least to go out and truly live. This is your only chance.
Sheff seems to revel in this lack of a higher meaning. And obviously the song is very meta, (as with all Okkervil River). It's a song about itself, about being in a band, the rock and roll myth, and making art for art's sake. At once cerebral and fiercely visceral, Sheff transmutes the futility of life in a post religious age into something glorious, through an exaltation of hedonistic excess.
    I don't know how much hard living Sheff does- he's always a couple of steps removed from his characters- but he sure has put a cogent and passionately argued case for going out and getting wasted. Or at least doing what you want.